Hardland is a world ruled by a dying king. It's also a world full of dangerous creatures and places worth discovering. We will not dictate your journey in this game -- all we do is set the stage so you can find your own. Our goal is to make Hardland one of the great open-world action RPGs.

All Reviews:

Mostly Positive
(286)
- 76% of the 286 user reviews for this game are positive.

Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“We simply want to make sure that what we think is best for the game is also something that goes well with the game's players.

We have experience opening up development to players, as well as developing projects behind closed doors. The really great thing about open development is you can make an update, publish it, get feedback, and improve. Many times over. In closed development you just have that one shot at release. That is why we chose Early Access and open development.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We expect the game's development cycle to take several years in total. The first Early Access version of Hardland in 10/2014 was also practically the first playable version of the game.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“Our first priority in Hardland is to create an immersive world for you to explore. In the Early Access version you are likely to encounter NPCs that don't have a full variety of behaviors, quests lines that cannot be completed, locations that don't seem to serve any purpose, dead ends, unbalanced items, bad performance, and other nuisances that will be gotten rid of by the game is ready to get released.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The current state of Early Access you can most readily see from the announcements section. At each update, we make a post detailing everything that is new. If you would like to know more about some specific aspect of the game that you don't see mentioned in the announcement, you can go into the forums and ask us directly.

By and large, however, the game is playable and all the four continents exist in the game. Many of the gameplay systems are up even if incomplete and unbalanced.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“Yes. What we ask in Early Access is less than what you would expect to pay for the full game. We want the price to reflect the completeness of the game to make it easier to support its development.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“After each update, we go through all the feedback we can find, be it on the forums, YouTube, or email. We look at what people like or don't like and use that information to help guide the development of the next update.”

Buy Hardland

November 30, 2017

We've been hard at work on the remaining features for the gold master.There's one major feature we’ll highlight today, the story.

For the past five months we've been developing the story of Hardland in tight cooperation with an extremely talented writer, Chandler Groover.

In the interactive fiction world, he's best known for his contemporary text adventures. Some games he's written include Toby's Nose, where you play as Sherlock Holmes's dog; Midnight. Swordfight., where you travel through time at a masquerade ball; and Eat Me, where you have to escape an enchanted candy castle using only your mouth.

To give you a glimpse of Hardland's new content, here's 8 unedited minutes of gameplay from the latest build. Sounds are disabled and music is temporary, but that will change in the coming months as we start plugging in the final audio. The footage takes place in a small town, Port Pulgar, where a twisted character called Ulf the Wolf has taken control:

There’s also been an extensive optimization round to improve the performance of the game.

The list of the entire changelist would be enormous so that won’t fit in this post. This is an example of the daily submissions to our version control server: (check out the scroll bar on the right!)https://i.imgur.com/vUJnw3b.png

About This Game

LOOKING TO JUST ENJOY PLAYING HARDLAND? WISHLIST IT!

Even if you are familiar with other Early Access games, there is an aspect to Hardland's development that may not be true for other games: we often have to work on game features in isolation from some other features of the game. This means you are not playing with the full feature set of the game until we are finished with the feature and can put things back to together, so parts of THE PLAY EXPERIENCE MAY TEMPORARILY DEGRADE BETWEEN RELEASES.

Other than that, the standard Early Access disclaimer applies; before the final release Hardland will contain many rough edges, quests that can't be completed, and game-breaking bugs. We recommend that you only join Early Access with us if you are interested in development or want to support the game. If you don't care all that much for development and are simply looking to enjoy playing, please add Hardland to your wishlist instead of buying it and jump in when we release the finished game.

OUR VISION OF HARDLAND

Please note that this describes Hardland as envisioned. The current state of the game you can see from the announcement posts in Steam's Recent Updates.

THE WORLD

Hardland is first and foremost about its world. It is about the towns and their people, the roadside taverns, the paths through its small forests, and the fox chasing the chicken through the fields. You can rest at the campfire, find treasure hidden in the woods and trade with the travelling merchant.

The world's layout is unique to you as all of the game's four continents are procedurally generated. Even though important landmarks such as Town of Fortuna, Snow Peak and Elven Citadel are handcrafted, their placement within the world is entirely decided by the procedural generator -- as is the placement of all the paths and roads running between towns, forests that surround the paths, and creatures that inhabit the forests.

The impending death of Elder King spells both uncertainty and opportunity for Hardland. The king's death would leave the land with no ruler and see many notable people around Hardland aspire to the throne. It is at this time that the player finds himself in Hardland, and as others struggle for the throne, the king's court in Root Hall struggles to find a cure to extend their ruler's life.

THE COMMUNITY

We are shaping the game with the community of Hardland's Early Access participants. As of 1/2017, the game has received 20+ major updates in Early Access. We discuss each update with the participants after its release where everyone has a chance to provide feedback about how the update changes the game and bring up things we should focus on for the next update.

THE DEVS

The development effort of Hardland is led by brothers Kimmo and Timo Vihola. Timo works on game design and art, whereas Kimmo's work is focused on game design and programming. Our team, Mountain Sheep, is best known for the iOS games Minigore, Bike Baron and Death Rally.